TOKYONovember 25, 2004Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL) announced Thursday that it will start sales in Japan of CryptoStor SAN VPN appliance, a new product from NeoScale Systems, Inc. (Head Office: Milpitas, California, U.S.A.; President & CEO: Barbara Nelson), with which TEL has concluded a distribution agreement.

CryptoStor SAN VPN is the industry's first security appliance that is designed to assure security while maintaining the performance of native fiber channels when Storage Area Network (SAN) is extended via a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). Since the appliance is tailored to SAN extension by combining the powerful security of VPN solutions with the performance of fiber channel SAN, it is able to assure both security and real-time capability simultaneously for disaster recovery in mission-critical businesses such as finance and xSP.

At present, SAN extension to remote areas is based on the method of turning SAN traffic into IP. Turning such traffic into IP requires extenders and encrypting IP-based packets requires still another device. The extension tends to degrade throughput and cause a delay, meaning that it is not suitable for real-time applications, such as synchronous disk mirroring and host-to-host communication. The CryptoStor SAN VPN, which is transparent to storage applications and networks, solves these difficult problems and provides the performance of native fiber channels with minimal delay.

CryptoStor SAN VPN also supports an optional compression function designed to maximize the usability of connection lines. It uses AES-256* to encrypt the fiber channel link. It also provides compatibility with devices comprising an optical MAN, such as existing DWDM or SONET.

By adding the CryptoStor SAN VPN to its product lineup, TEL will make a greater effort to sell solutions for corporate data protection in the future.

* AES-256: Advanced Encryption Standard is the U.S. government's next-generation standard encryption algorithm, which was chosen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 256 stands for the key bit length.

Product Specifications

CryptoStor SAN VPN

Hardware-based encryption: AES-256 encryption with IKE-based dynamic key exchange function to ensure data privacy

Native fiber channel throughput: full-duplex encrypted throughput at 1 or 2 Gbps

Hardware-based LZS compression: optimized MAN bandwidth

Minimized delay: hardware data path for minimizing delay

Secure management: uses SSL to access a Web-based management console

Secure platform: FIPS 140-2 Prevalidation (Compliant with FIPS 140-2 Level 3)